[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at>:

> Guy Chapman aka JzG schrieb:
>> On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:52:43 +0100, Raphael Wegmann
>> <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
>>
>>>> Wikipedia is extraordinarily tolerant of dissenting opinion.  People
>>>> only et banned when they have made heroic efforts to prove beyond
>>>> doubt that they are utterly unable to contribute productively.
>>
>>> I doubt that.
>>
>> Amorrow
>> JB196
>> Daniel Brandt
>>
>> All left editing for a long time after it became evident that they
>> were utterly unable to work within policy.
>>
>> So it seems your doubts are ill-founded.
>
> What I doubt is the "only" in your initial claim.
>
>>>> No, the only people who need to fear that are the *already banned*
>>>> abusers of the project whose socks we are blocking on an almost
>>>> daily basis.
>>
>>> And what kind of magic is involved in finding those socks?
>>> In what way is it different from a witch hunt?
>>
>> The average sockpuppet is traceable via IP using CheckUser and other
>> methods, whereas witch hunts require ducking stools and the like.
>
> None of those methods is verifiable by a normal editor.
> Therefore CheckUser and "other methods" are a kind of
> "witchcraft" for non-admins, where only the adepts make
> decisions.

Are you saying that you don't trust the people we have doing checkuser? 
Or that
you don't trust Durova and others who are good at picking up subtle signals of
socks? The first case, my response is going to be close to "well, too bad. The
rest of the community trusts them. If you disagree you need a good 
reason"- the
second case simply doesn't hold water because Durova, Guy and others 
are always
willing to email trusted users their evidence. On multiple occasions 
I've asked
to see copies of Durova's evidence in this sort of situation, and I've always
been satisfied. I'm not the only one. The ArbCom itself is capable when
necessary of judging the evidence. There are more than enough checks, balances
and oversight that it is far closer to science than witchcraft (to use an
analogy, just because a random person can't understand the proof to Fermat's
Last  Theorem doesn't make the proof witchcraft).